Ultrasound imaging has provided useful information about the interior characteristics of an object or subject under examination. One application where ultrasound imaging may provide such useful information is with robot-assisted surgery. With robot-assisted surgery, one or more physicians remotely control a robot to perform surgery from a computer workstation, which may be located in the surgical room, outside of the surgical room and within the facility, or at a remote location. Signals from one or more cameras are fed back to the computer workstation and displayed to provide the one or more physicians with a virtual surgical site.
Generally, the robot has one or more arms with one or more graspers that can be moved through several degrees of freedom. The one or more physicians use the computer workstation to control, via hand and/or foot controls, the arms and graspers of the robot apparatus to pick up, employ, and set down various instruments such as cameras, scalpels, lights, tweezers, etc. for performing a surgical procedure. For minimally invasive surgery, the one or more physicians use the computer workstation to control the arms and graspers of the robot apparatus to move the various instruments through openings in devices such as trocars, cannulas, or the like, or other openings into the patient.
While performing a robot-assisted surgery, a physician may decide to image a region of interest, for example, in order to acquire images that reveal certain underlying anatomical structure such as vessels, organs, etc. Unfortunately, ultrasound imaging probes, structurally, have not been configured or are not well-suited to be grasped and held by a robot, moved through an opening in a trocar, cannula, etc. into a patient via a robot, and positioned with the robot therein with respect to a region of interest to image the region of interest. Thus, there is an unresolved need for other imaging probes.